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happy new year!
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Frankenstein, Mary Shelley. 1818. Broadview Press Edition, 2012, eds. D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf, 2012. 358pp (but I haven’t read the appendixes yet, so much less than that). Little free library.
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Empire of the Senseless, Kathy Acker. 1994. 240pp. Local library.
I wrote enough on this to turn it into an essay, but I think it will be several more years before I'm ready to write that essay. I don't think I liked it...?
“The Future is a Struggle: On Kathy Acker’s *Empire of the Senseless”,* by Alexandra Kleeman in The Paris Review
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Beloved, Toni Morrison. 1987. 324pp. Mine. Third reread.
This novel has marked my reading life repeatedly as the beginning of a new, deeper cycle of engagement with literature. I had forgotten that I once annotated my copy. I finished my annotations, and this allowed me to appreciate the density of the warp; I often cheat myself of that by reading too fast. Or maybe most books just aren’t so thoughtful. Something I love in Beloved is Morrison’s lingering over folkcraft, cooking, tending fire: the brief profoundness of simple labour—done in freedom for oneself and one’s loved ones. But by those qualifiers I mean to emphasize that every motif in this book must be quietly ambivalent. Morrison asks trees and water, for example, to bear in intense pain and intense beauty by turns. Or perhaps it’s that the intense beauty of these things must be marred by the evil human beings do to each other. There’s no attempt to overtly reconcile how these feelings exist one after the other or in the same moment. How could you? Why would you? In Sula, which I read in February, Morrison writes of the Black townspeople, “What was taken by outsiders to be slackness, slovenliness or even generosity was in fact a full recognition of forces other than good ones" (90).
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Reading Genesis, Marilynne Robinson. 2024. 352pp. Local library.
Essay perhaps forthcoming: “Joseph”
James Wood in The New Yorker: “When Marilynne Robinson Reads Genesis.” Woods writes, “If God wanted to destroy the whole of mankind, [the theologist] Calvin says, he would be justified by our sinfulness….Robinson’s Calvinism holds out an earnest optimism about what awaits us in the afterlife, alongside a deep pessimism about our terrible brokenness here on earth.” Woods isn’t criticizing Robinson per se. Maybe I’ve been reading too much pessimistic philosophy, but I find myself totally sympathetic with the stance he describes.
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The Fraud, Zadie Smith. 2023. 451pp. Local library.
An enjoyable novel that performs a brutally tender balancing act in its attitude toward its central character: a white female abolitionist caught up in the events of the real historical Tichborne case. Sometimes the sensationalism and conspiratorialism around the case and the politics of Eliza Touchet’s positioning in the abolitionist cause teeter on cynically modern. But then, what’s the past good for if not to frame the present? Unless to do so privileges familiar intelligibility over unintelligible otherness.
“Is Zadie Smith All Right? Puzzling Over *The Fraud,”* by Sue Sorensen in Macrina. (I disagree with Sorensen here—the ”clutter” of the novel simply doesn’t bother me—but it’s a less commercial, thus more interesting, piece of criticism than the others I read.)
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Lacan, Malcolm Bowie. 1993. 252pp.
For those who, like me, have repeatedly run into the wall of Lacanian theory and bounced back rubbing your head. Left me with the same admixture of respect and irritation toward Lacan that Bowie seems to feel.
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The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism, Byung-Chul Han. 2022. 120pp. Local library.
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Frankenstein, Mary Shelley. 1818. Broadview Press Edition, 2012, eds. D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf, 2012. 358pp (but I haven’t read the appendixes yet, so much less than that). Little free library.
+++
Empire of the Senseless, Kathy Acker. 1994. 240pp. Local library.
I wrote enough on this to turn it into an essay, but I think it will be several more years before I'm ready to write that essay. I don't think I liked it...?
“The Future is a Struggle: On Kathy Acker’s *Empire of the Senseless”,* by Alexandra Kleeman in The Paris Review
+++
Beloved, Toni Morrison. 1987. 324pp. Mine. Third reread.
This novel has marked my reading life repeatedly as the beginning of a new, deeper cycle of engagement with literature. I had forgotten that I once annotated my copy. I finished my annotations, and this allowed me to appreciate the density of the warp; I often cheat myself of that by reading too fast. Or maybe most books just aren’t so thoughtful. Something I love in Beloved is Morrison’s lingering over folkcraft, cooking, tending fire: the brief profoundness of simple labour—done in freedom for oneself and one’s loved ones. But by those qualifiers I mean to emphasize that every motif in this book must be quietly ambivalent. Morrison asks trees and water, for example, to bear in intense pain and intense beauty by turns. Or perhaps it’s that the intense beauty of these things must be marred by the evil human beings do to each other. There’s no attempt to overtly reconcile how these feelings exist one after the other or in the same moment. How could you? Why would you? In Sula, which I read in February, Morrison writes of the Black townspeople, “What was taken by outsiders to be slackness, slovenliness or even generosity was in fact a full recognition of forces other than good ones" (90).
+++
Reading Genesis, Marilynne Robinson. 2024. 352pp. Local library.
Essay perhaps forthcoming: “Joseph”
James Wood in The New Yorker: “When Marilynne Robinson Reads Genesis.” Woods writes, “If God wanted to destroy the whole of mankind, [the theologist] Calvin says, he would be justified by our sinfulness….Robinson’s Calvinism holds out an earnest optimism about what awaits us in the afterlife, alongside a deep pessimism about our terrible brokenness here on earth.” Woods isn’t criticizing Robinson per se. Maybe I’ve been reading too much pessimistic philosophy, but I find myself totally sympathetic with the stance he describes.
+++
The Fraud, Zadie Smith. 2023. 451pp. Local library.
An enjoyable novel that performs a brutally tender balancing act in its attitude toward its central character: a white female abolitionist caught up in the events of the real historical Tichborne case. Sometimes the sensationalism and conspiratorialism around the case and the politics of Eliza Touchet’s positioning in the abolitionist cause teeter on cynically modern. But then, what’s the past good for if not to frame the present? Unless to do so privileges familiar intelligibility over unintelligible otherness.
“Is Zadie Smith All Right? Puzzling Over *The Fraud,”* by Sue Sorensen in Macrina. (I disagree with Sorensen here—the ”clutter” of the novel simply doesn’t bother me—but it’s a less commercial, thus more interesting, piece of criticism than the others I read.)
+++
Lacan, Malcolm Bowie. 1993. 252pp.
For those who, like me, have repeatedly run into the wall of Lacanian theory and bounced back rubbing your head. Left me with the same admixture of respect and irritation toward Lacan that Bowie seems to feel.
+++
The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism, Byung-Chul Han. 2022. 120pp. Local library.
Each of Han’s small, hypnotizing books has been a pleasure. As a layperson I find his account of Zen Buddhist philosophical interventions quite convincing.
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- “Saving Masud Khan,” Wynne Godley. In London Review of Books.
- “our brothers started dying,” Natalie Appleton. In Room 47.2
Movies and TV:
- Twin Peaks S1 (1990), showrunners David Lynch and Mark Frost